20080217

Waiting for news

Even though I've been doing this for nearly a decade, I still seem to get nervous with anticipation around the time that a conference is due to make a decision on one of my papers. You'd think that I could be more blase about it by now, yet here I am, checking email fervently, waiting for the results to arrive. Given the scope of the outcomes: either it gets in, in which yay, or else it doesn't, in which case, sigh, and try to fix it up for another spin around, there's not all that much to look forward to (at most one bit of information). Still, here I am cursing every time the email beeps and it turns out to be someone answering a message I sent last week. Can't you just wait to send your silly messages until during the week like normal people?

This yielded the following idea: a more discriminative email message noise. The system could scan for words like "delighted" and "accepted", and emit a "woo hoo!". "regret" and "many high quality submissions" would instead elicit a "doh!". Other messages could trigger "spam spam spam" or "boring!" as appropriate. I haven't really worked out all the details, but isn't that what the internet is for -- I post the big, and it's up to you to sort out all the tedious details.

Update: It was a 'doh' after all, anyway. It always is whenever I get so fixated.